Washington : The drug, Ranibizumab, has the potential to prevent blindness and visual impairment from age-related macular degeneration in non-Hispanic Caucasian patients, according to a computer-modeling study carried out by scientists at the Wilmer Eye Institute.

After gathering and analyzing data from the Beaver Dam Eye Study, as well as the US Census Bureau (2008), they predicted that 151,340 non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans would develop neovascular AMD in 2008.

The computer model predicted that if none of the 104,582 patients received monthly ranibizumab, 16 percent (16,268) of them would have become legally blind within 24 months.